


Lex Luthor: Quest for the Black Ring

by TheLightdancer



Series: One Ring to Rule them All: [1]
Category: DCU (Comics), Teen Titans - All Media Types, The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Amnesia, F/F, F/M, Injured Death of the Endless, New Teen Titans based Titans, Superman: The Black Ring AU, post-Blackest Night
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-27 19:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30127380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: In the wake of a very different Blackest Night in one version of the DCU, a wounded and amnesiac Death of the Endless finds herself in the care of the Titans.Lex Luthor, in the midst of the chaos induced by Nekron's rampage, begins a fateful quest that draws him into strife and enmity with other heavyweights of the DC multiverse's villainy. As the realm of Life and Death convulses with its wounded queen drawn to Earth, a drama ensues.
Relationships: Clark Kent/Lois Lane, Death of the Endless/Koriand'r/Raven (DCU), Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor, Lex Luthor/Robot Karen Starr
Series: One Ring to Rule them All: [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2217252
Kudos: 4





	1. Prologue: In the Wake of the Blackest Night

It had been a long and a difficult slog, where heroes had come into contact with mighty entities and what had begun as the War of Light when the awakened Conceptual Beings had grasped the nature of the world's changes and reacted....poorly....had become something else. None of them had anticipated that the twin sons of Death, Nekron of the Unliving and the Life-Entity, would awaken and that each would summon the Undead and the Unliving to wield on their behalves. Nor had they anticipated the appearance of a being who looked like a young teenage girl who had tried to set to rights the strife between her sons, only for Nekron to enter a towering rage and take his scythe and to tear into her very being. And then life had _pulsed_ and death had _altered_ and too late had Nekron grasped that this entity was telling him the truth. 

He had fallen to his knees then and his corps had begun to accept its defeat, Nekron bundled back into his dimension amidst new fetters and in a deep shame. The undead monsters had crumbled into ashes, no traces seemingly left of the Black Rings and the beasts that had arisen where Raven, of all heroes, had proven an unstoppable force and an immovable object against them. She had bought the world and its heroes vital time, and then she had seemed to vanish when her magic had suddenly given her an eerie droning howl in her ears when the strange girl had been cut. Her blood had been iridescent and the most terrifying reality of them all, to her, was an image old and familiar, of a bright silver ankh she remembered all too vividly from the day that she had brought her father forth into his manifestation in this world before being released of that control from her bloodline and having her flesh wielded by another intelligence, old and monstrous as her father and still more voracious in hunger. 

She did not care to remember overmuch the Terror of Trigon nor what it had wrought. But she had remembered then the ankh and the sight of dark eyes and the sound of a warm and welcoming voice. 

It raised disturbing prospects to her, ones that she was uncertain that she welcomed the feeling or the desire to feel from what their implications portended. 

Once more the heroes of Earth were victorious, the eldritch horrors from beyond vanished. The singularly unfortunately named White Lantern Corps, who conspicuously avoided the use of a term used unironically with all other Rings of their like, were for a time the pre-eminent among their number before their members parted ways and returned to their old patterns, the War of Light on pause for at time. Hopefully a long time, at that. It had been exhausting more than most, for where she played the not unimportant (at all) role of helping to heal her fellow heroes rather than gamble on unleashing her vast powers in a manner that would earn her more attention than she had ever wished, here she was on the front lines. The Black Lanterns fell before powerful emotions and none could match a daughter of Trigon in that power save her brothers and Belial, Ruskoff, and Skuge were all too busy intriguing with one another over the worthless prize of rulership of their Circle. 

She kissed her girlfriend on the cheek, and then teleported to Titans Tower in the harbor near San Francisco, and then found herself frozen in shock. 

There had been a flash of thunder and darkness above her, and then someone had fallen from the sky. She had but had the chance, as her smoke clouds billowed away, to see that fall and to hear the sickening crunch. Afraid to see the broken bones, entrails, and blood that this must inevitably mean, she was stunned to see the girl from the fight, her side deeply chasmed from a wound that was healing, partially scabbed but not all the way. The girl looked at her and tried to say something, raising herself on her side, and then passed out. It was as nothing for Raven's trained instincts to move, her hands gleaming with a brilliant blue light as she placed them on the side, whimpering at the thought of absorbing yet more pain into the infinite amounts her body carried. Fortunately she was used to this, yet even then she wailed in genuine pain as her own side burst into similar bleeding, though she was pleased to see the wound disappear on the woman's side, the girl seemingly older now in appearance, and slumped. 

Both remained like this, Raven's uniform coated in blood but no visible injuries present, when the rest of the team arrived. Both were taken to the infirmary, the other girl surprisingly heavy in weight, far moreso than her small size (smaller than any of the girls on the team, and much more slender than Donna and Kori) would have indicated. 

When Raven woke up, she blinked and her vision cohered, as she gratefully took the cup offered her by her girlfriend and gave her a quiet smile Koriand'r returned. 

The other girl awoke about fifteen minutes later, shaking her head. 

_**W-Where am I?** _

She looked around here. 

_**Why am I here?** _

Her looking around was more confused, initially, and then where there was tension growing in her and the infirmary table had deformed metal from the pressure of her fingers, a surprising and quiet demonstration of her strength that astonished both Kori and Rachel to see it, she was calmer a few minutes later, before the grip intensified. 

_**Who am I?** _

That was not a question they'd expected to see.

"Are...." Kori paused for a second. "Are you asking us?" 

The woman nodded her head. 

_**She healed me when I.....I fell. I think. I don't remember very well what happened. I got a cut on my side, a real bad cut, and she-** _

Then her eyes widened. She remembered the blood that appeared on Raven's side and the sudden horrific dawning comprehension before exhaustion had reached out to snare her. 

The cut had disappeared, but.... ** _Holy shit, are you OK?_**

The worry in her voice was genuine and Raven, knowing that the pain would be added to all the others simply gave the disingenuous nod she was used to giving even if her quiet squeeze of Starfire's hand spoke a deeper truth that led Starfire to frown briefly. 

The other woman did not see this, relaxing a bit. 

_**I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that. I don't know who I am or why I'm here but I'm not a threat, I promise you.** _

The Titans gave her a warm, amused smile. 

It was Kori who responded with a quiet: 

"We are the Titans. We've beaten the demon Trigon and my beautiful Raven here did much of the work to defeat Nekron. Even if you were, we wouldn't be afraid." 

She took Raven's hand and kissed it, the demoness still weary, her bloodstained robe feeling heavy against her. 

The other woman did not quite relax, for a bit, until she finally took a single deep sigh and put her face in her hands. 

The Titans, collectively, arrived at that point and the woman, who took the name Jane Doe good naturedly. As she hummed while flexing her hands, uncertain still as to where she was or why she was there, they were poised to call social services and to turn her over to Jump City when Donna squeaked: 

"The flowers!" 

They turned, and to their surprise the woman had removed one of her gloves and touched some flowers in a vase, out of simple boredom, only to see the flowers crumble into ashes that blew away on a sudden wind. She sprang back in horror and put her glove back on and jammed her hands in her pocket. 

"Well that transfer ain't gonna happen," murmured Vic Stone, and the team looked with some understanding and pity at the woman. In that manner the amnesiac Jane Doe found herself unwittingly drawn into a new aspect of her life. 

\-------

Thousands of miles away, across the United States, in Metropolis Lex Luthor bent over a table, finalizing the elements of a robot. In one universe she was built to resemble Lois Lane, as an act of spite to Superman. 

In this universe, she was built to resemble a very different person less as an act of spite to Superman in and of itself, and more as Lex Luthor's cruel and perverted sense of humor interlaced with misogyny as in his view a quite literal art form. Moving the artificial skin over the robotic face, he quietly spoke a word of command to activate the robot, which rose clad only in her artificial skin. 

A being that was a perfect mirror of Karen Starr, also the hero Power Girl (though Luthor did not know that then, deciding that the image of a rival competitor who embodied every sexist stereotype to him that he hated turned into his willing lover, even indirectly, would be worth it for the sheer spite alone) spoke in a voice that was a more than passable duplicate of Miss Starr's: 

"What is your bidding, my master?" 

Luthor smiled. 

Life and death were still unstable in the wake of the end of the Blackest Night, and the passing of the Brightest Day that had followed it. He had seen vast powers unleashed, he had wielded them too, as one who wielded the Orange Ring. Most thought that the universe would settle, that the instability in the power of life and death was because of the Rings. He was not so certain. His contacts on Apokolips and in other spheres had revealed that the Black Racer had vanished without a trace following the strange appearance of the being who seemed a teenager in the midst of the clash of the entities of Life and the Undead. 

The Black Flash only appeared if the damned Speed Force masters were unwell, and none of them, regrettably, were so so he could test that. 

The supermen did not obey physics as conventional reality dictated, but that was all right. 

If the laws of life and death were blurry and such power as he'd seen had been unleashed, he stood at the edge of something unimaginable, and that would bring him what he wished most. Lex Luthor Triumphant, Master of Mankind, not by will of any Gods, but over the Gods. A true Super-Man, emphasis on the Man, and even the physical God he spent his entire life opposing would know the true nature of his superiority that had always been there, and which always would be there. 

Rather than answering Karen's question, he pulled up a map amplified by various LuthorCorps drones. Seven spots, where seven elements of the unleashed power gleamed around the Earth. 

Luthor smiled. Seven steps on the ladder and then he, not the alien, would be the Super-Man before whom the entire world bowed. 

\--------

Vandal Savage looked at himself in the mirror. 

He had been alive for fifty thousand years and counting, born to the pre-human species now dubbed _Homo neanderthalensis_. 

For a very long time his grasp of technology, which had increased exponentially from chipping stone to the mastery of illusion had held. Then the Blackest Night had come and then something changed. 

Now, he, the immortal, who had taken for granted that his hair would always be black, had _streaks of grey hair._ His flawless skin had wrinkles and areas that _sagged._

He spoke guttural words in the Old Tongue, the Neanderthal speech that had been his birth tongue once upon a time and then roared in a truly bestial simian fashion, smashing his fist into the mirror, unconcerned with the shards of glass and the blood from knuckles and fingers. It was just a mirror. It was not bad luck to him, he was bad luck to it. 

Something had _changed._ The meteor with its strange coloration and the ankh-like sigil within it had given him his power and when he'd touched the Ankh he'd seen _something_ inhumanly beautiful with eyes black as night and hair that stood like the wildness of the very living Darkness itself. 

And then he had become himself. 

Now.....his oversized nose breathed in deeply and he made another guttural rumbling snarl. Long ago there had been a prophecy. Death would fall from the sky, wounded, and forgetting that it itself existed. And from this would rise one who would bring universal bliss and a brief end to entropy. 

The Blackest Night was neither the first nor the greatest single time he'd seen of the Dead rising, though it was the first time the risen Dead had been superpowered in a grand scale. 

And now this. 

He knew who to first contact, a being who like himself embodied from the perspective of the middling masses of Homo sapiens a fell mirror of themselves made bestial. His hands trembled slightly with age as he touched the button and an image appeared, stout and tall and hulking, his massive arms crossed across his chest. 

"Dear Light, Savage, what the Hell happened to you?" 

The rumbling voice of Grodd was much deeper than his own, a reminder not to take the creature lightly. 

"Something has affected Life and Death, Grodd." 

"Something other than the undead creatures powered by those rings?" 

Savage's dirty look led Grodd to cackle with a wheezy sound like that of an old man, before the gorilla straightened himself out. 

"I agree. One of the Seven Primordials stepped in for a very rare change of pace into the world as it is." 

"The...Primordials?" 

Grodd smiled. "The girl, Savage. Or the thing that looked like a girl. Somewhere out there, in the infinite masses of that which is beneath both of us, one of the most powerful beings in existence is right there. Imagine that power, that nature, bound to the service of one who could wield it. You'd look prettier again and I...." 

Grodd's vision became rapturous. "Ah, what glory. Humanity either extinct or rendered to look like the superior race." 

His flat hands brief smacked against his chest. "My kind, and yours." 

The two nodded. 

"And yes, there is that prophecy of yours. Death falls and then a man rises to bring universal bliss." Grodd snorted. "Such an inferior race deserves nothing of the sort. You have my interest and my alliance." 

"Good," croaked Savage, and then he turned off the screen. His hands were shaking and with anger he pulled out the glass, the pain as his flesh restitched itself back together and the damaged hand regained nerve functionality serving as its own motivator. He had not lived fifty thousand years to fall now! 


	2. Wheels Within Wheels:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lex Luthor encounters a certain mind-controlling insect. 
> 
> The Titans begin to adjust to the new Jane Doe that materialized in their midst. 
> 
> Destruction of the Endless encounters his brother.

_Luthor Corps Roof:_

Lex Luthor found himself dangling over a roof, held by the iron grip of a towering entity of skin the color of shale, eyes that burned like dead stars gazing at him. Most people held over a roof by Darkseid, King of Apokolips, would have felt a much more grievous pain than he did, for Darkseid was never kindly to humans, especially ones that were far more total an opponent of the idea of vigilantes than he was. That he was suspended over a roof by the God of Tyranny, however, told him not all was as it seems. He was Alexander Luthor, the world's smartest man. The only true superman, unlike the alien masquerading behind the name or all the other so-called heroes.

Darkseid moved him up so his upside down face got smacked in the chin and across the nose by his necktie, while the New God's face bored into his own.

 _ **Alexander Luthor Junior,**_ he heard the voice of Darkseid rumbling. To call it a voice was too light a word. It was reality distorting to form a sound. **_Here you are, then. You who believed yourself greater than Gods, in the hand of one of the mightiest of all the sons of the Fourth World._ **

Lex Luthor kept his face carefully still.

_**Now, Alexander, you shall learn the price of power and what it is to wield it.** _

Darkseid gave him an unpleasant grin and then dropped him only for Lex Luthor, aware that this was a dream, to grasp along the building and to literally slide down it creating ripples in the design. Darkseid cocked his head and then blinked.

\---------

Lex Luthor, master of the human genome, stood poised over a body beneath a sheet.

"I, Lex Luthor, have gone further down the path of creation than any other! I have built a body from the dust of the ground, reshaping and reworking the world that it shall know my genius! Wherever it endures, all shall know the name of Lex Luthor, master of mankind!"

His aide, the tall and buxom blonde Karen Starr, gave him a skeptical look.

"Did you rehearse that speech in the mirror, Herr Luthor?"

Lex's glare was a baleful one enough that Karen looked abashed.

"I did not create life to have my assistant dismiss my genius."

Karen snorted.

"People create life every time they do the horizontal mambo, Herr Luthor. What you speak of is sorcery, not science."

Luthor grinned at her.

"Behold my creation and tell me otherwise!"

With that he moved the sheets and a powerful and hulking figure lay on the table, hair dark as night with a spitcurl. Luthor grinned in a feral sense, and then shook his head.

"I know what this is, and what you're trying to do. You are a fool. None can command the mind of Lex Luthor!"

With that he snapped his fingers and soon he was clad within his suit of armor, gone from man to living tank, the armor full of secondary muscles that made it lighter and much faster than any armor ordinarily would be. The scenario rippled though Karen remained the same.

"How are you the same?"

She shrugged. "I'm a projection of your mind, Mr. Luthor, what do you expect me to be?"

He raised a finger in his right gauntlet, opening his mouth, then shut it again.

"My own mind is my worst critic. As it should be in a human," he sighed.

Reality began to ripple again and now he faced Darkseid once more, the towering colossus of Apokolips standing over the ruins of Metropolis, his arch-nemesis broken in two before the New God, whose eyes glowed with a feral delight.

_**You have failed, son of Terra. Your great singular goal was achieved by another.** _

_**You aspire to be a God, but you can never be one. Gods operate on grand scales, and have purity in motive and in focus.** _

_**You are the world's smartest man, you proclaim yourself. Its smartest man....** _

And then Darkseid was in front of him. the titan's hands reaching for his gauntlets, his power over matter beginning to corrode them as the New God pulled.

_**And the smartest human of Earth means as little to me as its smartest amoeba.** _

Luthor snarled:

"You seek to overawe me with something I fear. Men fear, but we overcome fear!"

With that his gauntlets gleamed and radion energy erupted from them and Darkseid roared in agony, hurling himself backward, his hands smouldering.

"Now to finish this."

Luthor held up a rocket launcher by his shoulder.

"No gods, no masters. No aliens pretending to be human in the skies."

Darkseid's insectoid eyes had an eerie glow.

_**You cannot do this.** _

Lex Luthor smiled.

"There you are."

Then he fired the rocket propelled grenade, which went off with an explosion of an odor akin to bugspray.

\---------

Lex Luthor found himself facing a colossus that suspended itself in the air by its telekinetic will, resembling nothing so much as the unlovely hybrid of the monster Battra from the Godzilla films, with its stretched body and gleaming red lights, and the beast from the remake of the Fly. His contemptuous thought led the insect to snarl in a droning fashion:

**You humans have always been arrogant dogs. I know what you seek, Luthor. You will not be able to wield it even if you find it.**

Luthor yawned.

"Humanity is the master of the universe, insect. Good morning, and begone."

With that he casually tossed what seemed to be a grenade and smiled when it detonated with the compressed force of a small black hole, a minor violation of physics and a mere testament to the means by which the magnificent brain of Lex Luthor was reshaping the world.

He would have been deeply disturbed had he turned back to see the insect's face turning into what seemed to be a more malevolent smile.

With that, Luthor went further down into his business and told his main minion:

"Mercy," in a voice smugger than usual, "activate the viewscreen. Contact Deathstroke the Terminator."

Yes, he knew he sounded smug. He'd faced and defeated one of the most powerful telepaths in the world, an inhuman monster ancient enough to predate even Vandal Savage and even the concept of bipedal apes on Earth with trivial ease. He damned well had earned the right.

The screen chimed into being and he saw a man of immense strength, with stout armor. His mask was off, revealing an eye patch and a short white goatee.

The man looked at him with disinterest.

"Luthor." A single word spoken in a voice that reminded Luthor eerily of Ron Perlman.

"You have received your half of the money, yes?"

Deathstroke nodded.

"All two million dollars of it, yes. A lot of money to go to the South Pole. You're not expecting me to face some Cronenberg alien monstrosity there, are you?"

Luthor couldn't resist a sharp bark of laughter.

"No, Slade. If I wanted to face such a thing I'd do it myself. You are paid to accompany me, and to give me your role as a bodyguard. No further questions asked."

Slade Wilson was quiet for a moment, flexing his gauntlets.

"Very well, Luthor."

Lex's face was impassive for a moment as he nodded, accepting Deathstroke's surrender as his due.

"Good. I will pick you up in that mansion in Rochester, and then we will go south."

For a moment Deathstroke's expression became that of sullen anger and then he shut off the communication.

Karen cocked her head.

"Is provoking an assassin with a super-genius intellect and a healing factor the wisest start to all this?"

Luthor's smug smirk turned to her, his gaze penetrating.

"You don't reason with someone like Deathstroke, you end up the bigger son of a bitch than he is."

Karen shrugged again.

"Whatever you say."

\---------

_The Watchtower:_

Karen Starr found herself looking at recent footage of Lex Luthor with his new girlfriend in the Daily Planet. 

For a moment she stared blankly and then her eyes became an incandescent red like coal-fires.

"That odious little misogynistic son of a bitch!"

Her fists clenched.

She stalked with the affronted dignity of a wet cat to the training room, where she ordered a hologram of Mongul with as close of an approximation to his full set of power as the programming allowed. Right now storming Lex Luthor's business in response to someone creating a robot seen as her 'unknown identical twin' in the words of Keith Lombard, would simply expose her secret identity in the worst possible fashion.

\---------

_A construction site, Moscow, Russia:_

**Brother,** he heard the voice of Dream and couldn't bite back a sigh. 

_What **is,** it, Dream?_

**Have you seen our sister?**

_Delirium? She's in a better place now, Dream. I gave my word that I would look after her and I did. Past that I still have no inclination to take up my position again and you know it. Why are you asking me a question you already know the answer to?_

Dream sighed.

**I mean our oldest sister.**

Destruction froze.

_Why are you asking me, of all people? You know I don't keep tabs on events and that I don't want to._

**She stepped into the recent strife between her sons. She was....injured.**

Destruction shrugged.

_Our sister is the strongest of all us who chooses to directly step into the world, Dream. You're worrying for nothing. No emo son of hers with a scythe can really and truly hurt her._

Dream steepled his hands.

**Her sphere is in too much struggle for that, brother. We do not have as physical a presence on this world at the moment as you do. All I ask is that if you see anything about her, let me know.**

Destruction shrugged again.

_If I do, I will. I rather doubt that I would, though._

Dream's response was a curt **hnf** , and then he was gone.

Destruction laughed and shook his head. The idea of his eldest sister being injured, even, was not something he was prepared to process.

Then something happened that made him question things. A bird fell from the sky, and where he would have expected to catch a small glimpse of her at her work (for he saw her most of all the family and she respected his privacy and let him manage his own affairs unlike all the rest of the family as she knew more than most the demons that drove him), he saw nothing. The bird twitched and it was in deep agony, but it remained alive.

Oh shit.

\-------

Titans Tower:

Jane Doe, as they called her, was seated in the Titans interrogation room for lack of a better place to put her at the moment. The Tower had no shortage of rooms for people to stay in, and Garfield and Donna were quietly setting one up for her, but for now it was easier to have her there.

The incident with the flowers had jolted them all. So did a small spate of strange anomalies. There had been a few brutal car accidents on the crowded streets of Jump City. One person who should by all rights have died lived, though they did so now in a hospital room hooked up to a ventilator, their survival a complete mystery. The rest were unharmed minus broken bones and cuts on their faces.

Searching in the same databases used by the League turned up anomalies like this worldwide. Those who should have died, by all rights, were alive, and living. It was not as the Brightest Day when those who had been brought back after time as Black Lanterns commanded the undead. There was......

Raven had seen quiet messages from her friends in her _second_ team, unable to resist a slight lip curl at seeing "Z. Zatara" at the end of the email. They had made up after the Terror of Trigon, though it had not been a pleasant moment or a kind one between them, and there was always an ugly satisfaction in seeing Zatanna Zatara, of all people, coming to her for help as a valued ally.

Kori snuck up on her after that, wrapping her arms around her.

"You OK?"

She turned her head to look and nodded.

"Good."

I'm going to check on Jane Doe, Raven spoke, her voice quiet as she tapped her chin. I think you should look at this, Kori.

Starfire nodded, taking the tablet into her hands and then her green eyes widened more than slightly.

There was an image from the New York Times obituary column from 1996. A sixteen year old girl, Didi D'Eath, had died of a heart attack in a fountain in Central Park. This Didi D'Eath was almost entirely identical to Jane Doe, save that her skin color had human melanin, where Jane Doe...did not.

Jane Doe sat surprisingly calm after everything, even if she kept checking her side with very clear skepticism as to her recovering from the injury she remembered with no visible trace.

When Raven stepped in her gaze met her.

 _ **Glad to see you're doing better,**_ she heard Jane say. Jane smiled, and her smile was a beautiful kindly grin, the kind that had Raven deeply entranced in a way that she had never imagined being for anyone not named Starfire (or Wally, but she kicked herself for that brief reflex).

Raven smiled back, softly.

_You seem calmer._

Jane nodded.

_**I am sorry about the flowers, I don't know what I did or why I did it.** _

Raven waved her hand.

_In terms of the things we've seen as superheroes, dead flowers are a minor thing._

Raven continued, as she leaned forward, supporting her chin on both her palms.

_We are the Titans, we can accommodate metas, especially ones with nowhere else to go._

For a moment the smile vanished and there was the image of something, of someone infinitely older and sadder, and then the empathic aura became so chokingly powerful that Raven found herself quite literally gasping for breath beneath a weight so powerful that her very being could not bear up against it. Kori felt her girflriend's distress, the two having become close enough that it was something she savored. It did not take her long to literally storm in, smacking the door open, the sound making Jane Doe wince.

She had her hands over her mouth and cringed against the wall, and cringed further when she saw her. 

_**I....I'm sorry. I keep doing this and I don't know what I'm doing. I don't want to hurt anyone. I'm sorry!** _

Kori's anger cooled when she saw this. Jane had her hands in front of her face, and she recognized that kind of defensive response all too well. All she contented herself with at first was quietly picking up Raven and floating out with her held in her arms bridal style, and then preparing for her some Earl Grey tea. Not long after, it was Donna Troy, her sword very visible at her side, who took over where Raven had tried to begin.

"That makes twice," Donna's voice had a colder edge to it than she truthfully admitted to herself was there "in less than six hours that you have nearly crippled one of us by accident. Who are you?"

 _ **I don't know,**_ the woman said, her voice laced with a genuine panic. **_All I know is that I fell from the sky and now I'm hurting people and I don't want to hurt anyone. If I knew how to stop it, I would. I....._**

Donna's head was cocked as she studied her body language. Themyscira taught deeply of such things, and beyond Themysciran science, she had other senses. Gifts, in this sense, from the Godwater and the blessings of the Dodecatheon. She heard in them sincerity.

"Well," she said, as she leaned back against the wall, her feet crossed on the table. "You're in the right place. Titans Tower does take in hard cases who have nowhere else to go. We have also had unfortunate...histories....with that, as not everyone with nowhere to go can adjust. It's a tragedy, but it happens."

Donna's gaze met Jane Doe's and it was colder, but then she cocked her head at a different angle.

"I know you, don't I?"

Jane Doe blinked.

_**Um, if you did I wouldn't remember it. Literally the first thing I remember is falling from the sky and wondering if I was going to die in the ocean or on the ground.** _

Donna winced.

"Something to be said for that, yes."

She thought carefully, for a moment, her fingers steepled to her chin. The strangest thing in her career was a point where she'd died, her first, dead body reanimated in the recent events and wielded as a weapon until Raven had dispelled it (and then Nekron had tried to resurrect both of Raven's prior dead bodies only to find out that it was easier to resurrect a child of Trigon's shell than to control it). She thought carefully and wielded those senses, the gifts of the Olympians and then she remembered dark clothing and a silver ankh and a voice of soft beauty telling her:

_**Not your time yet, I only come when it is.** _

That voice had eerie similarities but she could not recall whose voice it was.

Shaking her head, she looked carefully at Jane Doe.

"Whoever you are, you have....power. A lot of it. Raven is one of the most powerful mystics on the planet. Only Aquaman, the Spectre, and Nabu are considered stronger sorcerers in the fields of magic. Well, Tim Hunter counts, I suppose, but he doesn't really do much with our group except Zatanna Zatara."

She snorted, then continued drily: "I can't imagine why a young man would hang around with a beautiful woman in fishnets."

Jane couldn't resist a brief snort of laughter herself.

Donna's voice became much more serious.

"And you've knocked out one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world twice. Once with an injury, the second with....empathy, I'm going to guess. It's why she can't scan the likes of Darkseid or others whose emotions are too strong, and the ability do that is its own danger sign." 

She raised her hands before Jane could speak.

"I know you're sorry, but you should understand one thing about us Titans and it's a very important thing. We're more of a family than a team, and we owe that, all of that, to Raven. She got us together to face her father, and she took us from being in the shadow of the Justice League and the garbage dump for sidekicks too strong to play the supporting role but not trusted enough to do our own thing. Kori's dating her now that she and Dick finally broke it off, so you're lucky that after two things like that the princess didn't pull a Chewbacca on you."

Jane Doe raised an eyebrow.

Donna shrugged.

"It is what it is. Raven has a soft spot for people like her and sometimes that's worked out, and sometimes it hasn't. I think we'll be taking you in, but I'm going to give you a very blunt warning, as a veteran of Themyscira, where my people get our training by smacking down and sending back what Tartarus vomits up."

She leaned close, her gaze a searching one, and Jane Doe found herself pressed against the wall, feeling dwarfed by Donna.

"We have learned from the past. If you seek to hurt us, we don't try to rehabilitate, we will kill you. No more games like this, not with any of us. Accidents happen, if it becomes deliberate..."

Donna leaned back and drew her blade, adorned with runes of Themysciran make.

"These blades are designed to shatter the mortal shells of gods and demons, to send their immortal essences shrieking back to the blasted heaths from which they came. You are most unlikely to be a Goddess, but it would not matter if you were. Kori would not do it nearly as nicely as I would."

Frozen with shock and fear, Jane Doe nodded.

Then Donna softened.

"Besides, it's clear that you really don't know what you're doing, and that's something we will change."

She gestured to the door and as Jane went out, she then said "Come with me."

Jane walked through the halls of the building she was in, seeing only a small portion of a much vaster building, going a floor beneath the other Titans, on the other side of the hall from the room Raven and Starfire shared.

She paused at the room that said "Jane Doe."

"Until we have another name for you, that'll do," Donna said, her voice briefly wry again.

She then handed her a small sticky note, with a set of numbers on it. "That's the key to your room. You can change it if you like. And you don't have to go in now." 

Jane nodded, and then quietly padded back after Donna, who looked back at her curiously.

Jane returned the look.

_**I......I want to make sure Raven's OK and that....Kori, you called her, isn't too mad at me. I'd be mad at someone who showed up and hurt the person I loved twic in that kind of short order.** _

Donna's nose twitched and her lips pursed.

"I.....I really don't think this is a good idea, but what the Hell."

She pressed the elevator button and they went in the elevator and stood side by side, not looking at each other, even if Jane Doe managed to be the rare type to even find some quiet enjoyment of elevator music, which left Donna...confused.

\--------

When they stepped out, Kori saw her and waved Jane Doe over.

She strode quietly, fearfully so.

Raven was fully back to normal at this point, if a little flushed in looking at Kori (the memory of just where her face had wound up when she'd managed to overcome the empathic sledgehammer was something that would not be fully expunged until later that evening).

 _I'm fine,_ she said, quietly but determinedly.

We had a quick chat with Dick, and they want Kori and I to start teaching you how to control what you can do and to learn what you can do.

"Not me?" Donna raised an eyebrow.

"They ah......well, you're the backup plan," Kori said. "I'm expected to be the mean drill sergeant, you'd be the uh....funnier one, maybe?"

Donna shrugged. "Whatever. Just be cautious."

They nodded.

Kori then looked at Jane. "But we're not doing that today. I want my girlfriend to enjoy a nice quiet afternoon."

Donna smirked, and then leaned in to whisper into Raven's ear and Raven went beet red, while Jane simply went over to another couch and sat at it.

She looked at her hands, making sure her gloves were pulled firmly enough that they hurt. She could feel something in the air, something wrong. Like something was missing, either in the world, or in herself.

There was a power that built behind her eyes and within her, something she was consciously aware of.

She was more conscious than she had been of the weight of a chain around her neck, and the ankh that was on the upper edge of her stomach, and she pulled it out to look at it. It was silver, at least at the surface. There was a luster to the metal that did not reflect the light like true silver and she stared at it, fascinated to see overlapping and interlocking magic.

It was a strange sight and one she understood at one level while staring at the interlocking and deep elements of the sorcery in the ankh with complete incomprehension in others.

As she stared at it she placed her hand around it and for a moment she felt herself in so many other places at once that her head spun, and then the strange anomalies around death for a moment seemed to vanish.

\--------

In Moscow, Destruction of the Endless remained staring at the bird, willing himself to invisibility in the eyes of mortals to see if what he feared might be was so. Finally, at last, he saw his sister though she did not see him. She seemed.....off, and he could not quite put his guess as to why, and knelt down beside the bird. A sound of wings and then she looked up and she saw him and realized he could see her.

Before he could ask her if something was wrong she fell to her knees with her hands on her head, and then she seemed to vanish in a flash of light.

_Oookkayyy...._

Destruction mused.

 _I may have to contact my brother after all._ Destruction made a rather histronic sigh. _Could be worse, at least I'm not expected to keep Dream and Desire from killing each other anymore._

\--------

In the Dreaming, Dream of the Endless felt his sister's realm stabilize for a moment and sighed in relief. Evidently his brother Destruction was right. For now, he had to make certain in the wake of that turmoil that the realm of Nightmare, and the prison for his most dangerous nightmares, was fully intact.

Without much of any concern for a time, he resumed the affairs of his realm and believed that all was right with the world.

\-------

In Titans Tower Jane Doe put one hand to her head and then slumped into the couch, eyes rolling, before screaming in a bloodcurdling volume that left ears ringing and slipping into a state of unconsciousness that left the Titans uneasy.

Gar Logan popped his head in.

"I thought I'd left the weird shit behind when I left the Doom Patrol."

The other Titans snorted. His eyes flickered to Raven and seeing her conscious and alive and well, and Donna and Kori too, he decided to kip back on over to his girlfriend, Tara.

If something was too much to handle for Raven, Kori, and Donna he'd just call the Justice League as he had no illusions it'd be something he could handle.


End file.
